


The Cold

by Mungo_of_Maundery



Category: Hustle
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Living Together, Sickfic, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 23:17:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10372053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mungo_of_Maundery/pseuds/Mungo_of_Maundery
Summary: When one member of the crew gets sick, that means consequences for everyone.





	

Albert picked it up first, from a potential mark he had been sniffing out at the time. It hit him hard just a day later, and although he fought valiantly to hide his symptoms from the rest of the crew, they soon picked up on his shivering, sneezing, exhaustion and general _down_ -ness – and then he found himself plied with blankets and Lemsips and insistences that he ‘take it easy’. Albie (correctly) took this to mean that he was essentially under house arrest until he was feeling better.

Once he’d resigned himself to the fact that his head was too foggy to read and his nose and throat too clogged to talk much, and his shivering too violent to play anything without spilling cards all over his opponent, there wasn’t much to do but give in and admit that this time he was beaten. It was hideously dull. The most fun was to be had in occasionally turning the TV on and staring at it disconsolately until either Stacie or Mickey were drawn to his side to offer food and sympathy for his sorry state. He allowed himself to be pet and pandered to with nary a complaint in sight.

But this, of course, came with a price, when both Mickey and Stacie went down overnight and emerged the next morning miserable and sneezing. Albert charitably offered them a couple of his blankets.

‘Probably my fault you’ve got it, after all,’ he mumbled sheepishly. Stacie accepted as gracefully as she could while frantically searching for a handkerchief with her other hand, and promptly wrapped herself in the proffered blanket and flopped onto the other sofa, turning her back to the rest of the room.

Mickey, on the other hand, shrugged off all blankets and offerings of paracetamol with the slightly tetchy insistence that he was _fine_ , thank you very much. Albie and Stacie, who’d been left with the living room to themselves, placed bets on how long he’d last. Mickey finally gave himself up to the inevitable after an unfortunate fit of sneezing in front of the pair of them gave him away. He repaired upstairs with an air of forced dignity and a sympathetic pat on the back from Ash, and quarantined himself sullenly while Albie and Stacie giggled at his failed stoicism.

Stacie, it turned out, was more than happy for the excuse for long naps and excessive daytime TV, even putting up with Danny’s sudden attack of overly-chivalric solicitousness with scarcely an eye-roll to the others. She allowed Danny to fetch her cups of tea and boxes of tissues, Danny not even realising he was being used as a nurse/errand boy. She even iced it by calling him a ‘star’ when he returned with the requested items. It was all masterfully done, in Albert’s opinion, but Danny’s scorn when Mickey, emerging momentarily from his self-imposed quarantine upstairs, hinted at similar treatment, clearly demonstrated that such special accommodations were reserved only for Stacie, and occasionally Albie if he contrived to look dejected enough. A couple of pathetic, half-hearted sneezes, along with a tug of his blankets around himself, and a morose look, usually did the trick.

However, Danny’s sudden inclination to be helpful didn’t last long. In fact, it lasted precisely as long as it took him to realise that whatever could be spread from a mark to Albie to Stacie and Mickey, could be passed to him as well. This fear was compounded when Ash, who had quietly taken on most of the housework of the penthouse as well as running around making sure the thermostat was turned up and everyone had enough cough sweets and entertainment, was found asleep and vaguely feverish on his desk.

“Oh, now not you as well,” Albie remarked, poking him.

“What?” Ash raised his head. Albert gestured.

“Our cold. You’ve only gone and got it yourself.”

Ash let his head drop back onto his arms again, sniffed, and sighed, before turning his head to say, “I’ll live. It’s not the end of the world.”

At that moment Stacie shuffled in wearing a fluffy dressing gown. “God, Ash, you look awful.”

“She’s right,” Mickey said from across the room where he had been sat for at least an hour, in an effort to be sociable, staring blankly at the same page of a book. “You should rest.”

Ash would not be daunted. He simply sat himself down with a bag of oranges and a laptop and continued to work around the occasional sneeze.

Having seen the rest of the crew taken one by one by this beast of a cold, Danny was becoming paranoid. He was also uncomfortably aware of the fact that he had teased them all for their evidently abysmal immune systems right from when Albie had got ill and that this would surely jinx him.

Danny’s quarantine policy was put into immediate effect. It consisted of generally avoiding the rest of the crew, reading long articles entitled _How Not To Get Sick When Everyone Around You Is_ , and passing tissues, medicine and requested books or foodstuffs to the suffering patients on the end of a device of his own construction, namely the pan of a dustpan and brush taped to a broom handle. He had also developed an annoying habit of spraying everything in the room, including the rest of the crew, with antibacterial spray, impervious to their shrieks of indignation and discomfort.

“It’s only a matter of time, Danny,” Stacie said thickly as Albie and Ash exchanged incredulous looks about the scarf wrapped around the lower half of Danny’s face. “You’re just going to have to resign yourself to it.”

Danny pulled down the scarf with a rubber-gloved hand, opened his mouth indignantly – and sneezed.

***

A week later, everyone else was more or less recovered. Ash was still a little sniffly but was back on his feet and chasing away the remnants with some good solid grift work. Albie, Mickey and Stacie were fully recovered and back to their own occupations.

The only one who hadn’t was Danny.

Cries of “I’m dying!” could occasionally be heard and would grow louder and more disconsolate the longer he went without attention. Very little seemed to cheer him up – cards were alright, until he started losing, in which case he would accuse them of taking advantage of him in his weakened state.

“I’ll make some soup,” said Ash with a long-suffering sigh.

Mickey rolled his eyes and glanced through the door to the other room in which Albie and Stacie were attempting to cheer up a very irritable Danny. “He’s being insufferable. Why doesn’t he just grow up?”

“He’s all right,” Ash said, emptying a carton of soup into a pan. “Give him a couple of days.”

“If we survive that long,” Mickey muttered under his breath.

Ash chuckled, then nodded his head at the pan. “You want some?”

“Go on then.”


End file.
